


brave new world

by quadrille



Series: they weren't all mistakes [3]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: 2x22, Between Seasons/Series, Comfort, During Canon, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Exes, F/M, Fix-It, Old Friends, Season/Series 02, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 04:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14825060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: He comes further into the house, and glances at the front door — recognises the new locks, his handiwork, a fairly recent memory of when he installed them. “Distract me,” Alice says behind him, a fragile little plea, but he knows the woman’s tics, her voice, the delicate seesaw of her moods. Knows that she doesn’t mean that particular sort of distraction.So: “I’ve retired from the Serpents,” he announces instead, seating himself in one of the overstuffed armchairs, fingers drumming restlessly on its arms.





	brave new world

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another iteration of the Falice scenes we shoulda had in canon. Deals with the aftermath of "Judgment Night" and "Brave New World"; spoilers for those episodes.

Jughead is a shattered wreck in that hospital bed: bruises blooming over his face, skin stitched and held together, ribs broken, blood vessel burst in one eye. FP sits hunched-over in the chair beside him, fingers laced together over his jittering knees and staring at the unmoving figure.

He’s been on the other side of nights like this, in his youth. Answering uncomfortable questions from the doctors, picking up a prescription for painkillers, moving with ginger movements under the disapproving eye of Forsythe Jones the First.

But this was exactly what he didn’t want for his own son.

FP sits vigil — he doesn’t even know what the Serpents are doing right now, and doesn’t give a damn, to be honest — and is occasionally a pain in the ass for the doctors, but mostly he just waits, in that helpless futility and stewing over his choices. The long road that’s led to this place. The local news on the TV in the room keeps blaring about the riots, which he mutes at first, then turns off completely.

He misses the arrest of the Black Hood entirely.

Eventually he falls asleep crammed into that chair at an awkward and uncomfortable angle, chin propped in his hand and arm against the plastic back. He develops a crick in his neck that he doesn’t feel until he wakes up.

The next morning, Alice stops by when Betty does. Neither of them have slept, so it’s a simple thing to get in the car and drive to the hospital and then start pacing the hallways. It’s like they’re passing through the eye of the storm: it doesn’t even feel like she held off her murderous husband and watched him being carted away in handcuffs just a few short hours ago. 

FP comes walking wobbly-legged out of the hospital room, giving up his seat for Betty. (He’s been doing a lot of that lately.) Scrubbing at his face, he steps outside and finds Alice hovering there in the doorway, glancing in at the boy as her daughter settles in to take up watch instead.

“Has he woken up yet?” Alice asks.

“Nope.” FP looks absolutely haggard, drawn thin and frayed. He looks how Alice feels. But she’s managed to cobble herself together to come here ( _mom, we have to go to the hospital, it’s Jughead_ ), and so she finds herself instinctively fussing over FP, asking if he’s eaten, if he’s slept. It’s also easier to stay squarely focused on the man in front of her, and to not tell him what happened last night — she wouldn’t even know where the hell to begin. After a few minutes she goes to the nearby vending machine, fetches him a cup of tea, and folds the warm paper cup into his hands, which FP looks at as if he’s not entirely certain what it is, but drinks anyway.

She keeps her hands curled over his for a moment, giving a reassuring squeeze despite the bustling public space around them. He doesn’t even notice, and that’s alright.

Behind them, Betty emerges in the doorway, and both of them turn to look at her.

“I’m going to stay here,” Betty says. “Until he wakes up.”

  


* * *

  


But once Alice is away from the hospital, and away from the oddly reassuring preoccupation of worrying about someone else, she promptly falls apart. Without the immediate distraction of the Jones family’s problems, now she has to face up to her own: an empty house, an old projector to put away, a phone to take off the hook because it keeps blowing up with reporters calling. The idea of sleeping in her bed, the bed she _shared_ with Hal, makes her want to boil her skin off, and so Alice sleeps on the living room sofa instead, wreathed in blankets.

She’s coming untethered at home, wandering about like an aimless zombie. Betty takes a few days off to take care of her once Jughead is safely up and moving again — making chicken noodle soup and endless cups of tea, as if her mother’s simply sick with the flu — but in the end she does need to go back to school. She can’t just put her entire life on pause.

So Betty calls in the reinforcements.

FP agrees readily enough, and later that day slips to the back of the house. It’s a familiar move; he can’t count the number of times he snuck into the Smith house through Alice’s window. No windows today, but he waits in the garden instead, tapping gently at the glass backyard door. When Alice opens it, she’s ready to be furious with a reporter for actually trespassing into her backyard — but then she realises it’s him, and the anger melts away from her face.

No makeup, flyaway hair, a rumpled bathrobe. She automatically tries to smooth down her hair as soon as she sees him — aghast at being seen like this — but FP catches her hand, moves it away, and presses a kiss to the top of her head before slipping indoors. Before any of the reporters get bored with the unchanging view of the front of the house, and spot them in the back. (He’d been prepared to wade through the whole sea of them and fend his way to the front door, but this way is easier.)

Once they’re safely inside, FP appraises her across the dining room.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, bluntly.

An attempt at a flippant shrug. “You had your own problems.”

FP looks stricken at how selfish this makes him seem, but Alice quickly shakes her head, catches his sleeve. “No. No, I wanted it that way. I felt better in that hospital than I do here. I got to think about something that wasn’t… this. This _bullshit._ It was better. I wanted to make sure you and Jughead were alright.”

He comes further into the house, and glances at the front door — recognises the new locks, his handiwork, a fairly recent memory of when he installed them. “Distract me,” Alice says behind him, a fragile little plea, but he knows the woman’s tics, her voice, the delicate seesaw of her moods. Knows that she doesn’t mean that particular sort of distraction.

So: “I’ve retired from the Serpents,” he announces instead, seating himself in one of the overstuffed armchairs, fingers drumming restlessly on its arms. 

“What?” That does the trick. The woman gives a surprised laugh, startled out of her own thoughts. “But…. but you’re their _king_.”

“I know. Or I was. Funny thing is, my boy seems to know what’s best for them, more than I do — fights for ‘em more fiercely, at least. Don’t think I have the nerve for it anymore.”

“You’re getting old,” she says, an attempt at teasing. At recapturing what normalcy feels like.

“Aren’t we all.” A beat. “How’re you doing, Alice?”

After a pause to consider, she gestures at the surrounding house, at herself, the uncharacteristically messy dishes. For once, the Cooper household doesn’t look like something cut out of an interior design catalogue. And ordinarily she wouldn’t let anyone outside her family see her so shamefully undone; she tends to doll herself up around FP, fresh coat of lipstick like warpaint, artfully mussed hair, a hint of cleavage, snakeskin print as a message intended exactly for him. But today she simply doesn’t have the energy to look human. “How do you think?”

Although the truth is—

“Still hot,” he says wryly. “Even if you’ve still got that stick up your ass.”

She almost laughs again. It’s a welcome feeling, and a welcome gesture. He’s trying to shake her out of her depressive lull.

Smith and Jones, back to their antics again. It was a common refrain with their exasperated teachers.

They talk for hours, enough to distract her from the buzz of reporters outside. Eventually they do broach the subject of her husband; Alice can’t believe she recently considered going back to him, can’t believe the absolute depths Hal contained, so much worse than she ever imagined. (She cries again, and by that point FP’s joined her on the couch and she folds herself into his lap, her chin against the reassuring warmth of his chest.) Later on she pulls together a kind of half-hearted dinner for them — for the first time in years she’s resorting to instant mac’n’cheese, and it propels her back to a time when purse-strings were tight and her parents were living paycheck to paycheck, barely affording food. She and FP would microwave dinner while she helped him with his algebra homework (or just did it for him, if she was feeling lazy). It’s been a long time since then.

The man falls asleep on her sofa. Which has been _her_ spot these last few days, so she finds herself briefly at a loss for what to do.

“FP,” she says softly, a hand gently combing into his disheveled hair, smoothing it back from his forehead. He jolts awake with a hand catching her wrist, reflexively — but then he relaxes, sags back into the cushions. “Sorry.”

He looks exhausted. They both do.

“C’mon upstairs,” she says.

They go to bed in the guestroom, in crisp, freshly-laundered guest sheets and between unfamiliar walls. She would have preferred his trailer, really, but that’s another can of worms — the trailer park is a burnt wreckage around his home as the last one standing, and it’s more than an eyesore, it’s a knife of guilt twisting in FP’s stomach. So they stay here instead. FP smells reassuringly of woodsmoke (she finds herself missing the Serpent bonfires suddenly), and leather, and maybe a bit of whiskey. His arms curl around her.

And she exhales, for what feels like the first time in months.

She’s used to either of them slipping out in the morning, skulking away on a half-proud walk of shame, never staying the night and certainly not sleeping in — but this time, it’s all restful sleep and nothing else.

  


* * *

  


“Mom! _Mom!_ ” There’s a panicked edge to Betty’s voice.

_Oh no._

Alice is up and awake like a bolt of lightning. She shoves a pillow in FP’s face — as if that’s enough to hide him — and seizes the bathrobe again, swiftly knotting it shut. Despite the fact that nothing happened between them (this time), it still looks incriminating. She opens the door and tiptoes out onto the landing, where Betty whirls to face her.

“Your room was empty, I…” The girl is looking frazzled, too, so Alice is quick to reassure her, press a kiss to her daughter’s cheek, soothe her rattled nerves.

“I can’t fall asleep in the master bedroom,” Alice says apologetically. She half-wonders if it might be time to sell the house, but she needs to give that idea some time to ruminate, mull over it.

Betty glances behind her mother, to the distant bed, where she can just see the line of a shoulder and a mop of dark hair pressed into the pillows. Her eyes widen.

“Mom, were you _with someone_ in the…” And just like that, Betty finally pieces two-and-two together and remembers what her mother said to her father just a week ago; realises it wasn’t just a bluff, wasn’t just a reference to a long-ago high school tryst. “Oh my god, were you with _FP_ in the guest r—” 

Alice closes the door quickly behind her and makes a hushing noise, despite the fact that it’s unnecessary. FP sleeps like the dead around her, like he always has. “Nevermind about that for now. Have you had breakfast yet?”

Her daughter still looks gobsmacked, her understanding of the world rocking even further on its foundations. So Alice pats Betty on the shoulder and sweeps cheerily past her, heading downstairs to the kitchen. “I’ll make pancakes for all of us,” she announces, a bit less brittle, a little more chipper. Well-rested, she’s finally feeling more like herself — which means being indomitable, headstrong, bulldozing right over others.

Everything’s not fine, not yet.

But they’re getting there.


End file.
